Just Writing Center Work in the Digital Age: De Facto Multiliteracy Centers in Dialogue with Questions of Social Justice

Multiliteracy, new media writing, and multimodality: in some form or another, the kind of sleek, technological world these terms conjure emerges as a subject of conversation in current writing center work. When I began teaching a writing center theory course at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing, I scheduled about three-days worth of formal space for the stuff of multiliteracy. Among other essays, students read David Sheridan’s “Words, Images, Sounds: Writing Centers as Multiliteracy Centers,” a piece about how Sheridan helped start a “technology-rich” multiliteracy center staffed by tech- and multimodal-rhetoric-savvy consultants at the University of Michigan (“Words, Images, Sounds” 341). I was met with what I soon learned was a typical response to the essay: “So, where is it? Where’s the multiliteracy center?” “Gone,” was my answer, and in an official sense, it was: it dissipated after only a few years,1 and, what remains, among other Sweetland services, is the Peer Tutoring Center, an apparently far cry from the futuristic spaces that visions like Sheridan’s evoke. With computers too old and too few in number, our windowless, underground tutoring space looks like days of writing center past, not writing center future. And despite an understanding of our own institutional privilege, our collective affect resembles that of colleagues at less privileged institutions: many of us still feel like we are a long way off from the kind of cutting-edge multiliteracy center that Sheridan describes.University Writing Cente

Toward a Rhetoric of Labor Activism in College and University Writing Center

This essay considers the present degree of the writing center field’s engagement with labor activism in the age of the corporate university and argues that writing center practitioners are well positioned to reconstitute their identities: to re-envision themselves and their colleagues as poised to engage in activist rhetorics and live lives as academic activists. By employing a rhetoric of labor activism and thereby addressing labor issues in more robust ways alongside professional organizations that represent them, writing centers can work to revitalize shared governance and academic freedom, both of which are threatened by corporatizing forces, and they can influence emergent institutional and professional historiesUniversity Writing Cente

Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice: Problems with Multilingualism and Possibilities via Hybridity

In much writing center theory and practice, conversations about multilingual writers have tended to involve L2 writers. Often international students, these writers speak at least one language other than English, but they perhaps speak more than just one other language despite their L2 designation. They do not speak English as their first language, and when they come to English-language-based institutions of higher education, they find themselves needing to learn and learning English. More recently, however, the field of writing center scholarship has recognized complexity in the category of multilingualism. Especially following the publication of Terese Thonus’s “Serving Generation 1.5 Learners in the University Writing Center,” Generation 1.5 or L1.5 writers have emerged as part and parcel of writing center practitioners’ and scholars’ conversations. Neither L1 speakers and writers nor L2 necessarily, Generation 1.5 writers exist in a linguistic liminal space. Although much variation exists among Generation 1.5 writers and although Generation 1.5 writers do not inherently represent a single, transitional generation in a family’s immigrant history,1 Linda Harklau, K. M. Losey, and Meryl Seigal define them as writers with “backgrounds in US culture and schooling” who sustain identities that are “distinct from international students or other newcomers who have been the subject of most ESL writing literature” (vii). They differ from English as a Second Language (ESL) students in that they “are primarily ear learners,” and they may “have lost, or are in the process of losing, their home language(s) without having learned their writing systems or academic registers” (Thonus 18). They are neither here nor there in terms of their linguistic identities. Or, perhaps, they are both here and there.University Writing Cente

Faith, Secularism, and the Need for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Center Work

This article argues that religious and secularist identities complement and intersect in political ways with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality and that they inform writing center practice because belief exists along a spectrum that involves all writing center inhabitants and affects all writing-centered conversations. We suggest that this spectrum of faith is evocative of the spectrums that theorists of race, gender, and sexuality in particular have discussed, yet often faith has been overlooked in discussions of identity in writing center work (Denny, 2010). We propose that theories of race, gender, sexuality and other identities that have served as springboards for professional development in writing centers can help to facilitate the development of a greater literacy of faith and secularism as complicated and nuanced identities. Specifically, we believe theories involving intersectional social justice work and hybridity can help to facilitate self-reflective and productive interfaith dialogue or dialogue about faith and secularism. Thus, such theories can help writing center professionals dismantle stereotypes about believers and secularists and problematic notions of what faith, or a conversation about faith, is or should be

Contingency and Its Intersections in Writing Centers: An Introduction

Introduction to WCJ 41.1, which is a special issue on contingency in writing centers

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs

This article speaks into the pervasive silence on the subject of faith in writing center and writing program work. Through revisiting Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and investigating silence, we encourage “counterfudamentalist work”: work that counters fundamentalist methodology by inviting fundamentalists and believers and nonbelievers of different kinds into nonliteralist and open-minded ways of reading writing-centered experiences involving religious faith and secularism. The three authors of this article offer personal narratives about their own experience with faith in their centers/programs and use different theoretical perspectives to start a necessary dialogue on faith and religious experiences. By interweaving theoretical perspectives, research, and personal narratives involving our WPA work, this article argues that writing center/program administrators must do the same, and we hope to model the types of conversations we must bring into our centers.University Writing Cente

Contingent Writing Center Work: Benefits, Risks, and the Need for Equity and Institutional Change

This study investigates and reports on the personal, professional, and programmatic benefits and risks associated with contingent writing center work. Interviews were conducted with 48 contingent writing centers workers, including directors, assistant directors, associate directors, graduate student workers, and tutors. Survey data of the interview participants showed contingent writing center workers are usually White women with advanced degrees. Most of this article focuses on interview data, analyzed using grounded theory. Interviews revealed participants’ understanding of what contingency means and revealed their struggles with instability, insecurity, and uncertainty even while they lauded the flexibility, freedom, and autonomy their contingency afforded them. The interview data also further revealed the ways in which these working conditions were created and maintained by the institution. These findings suggest the need for collective action across the composition and writing center fields—from professional organizations, tenure-line writing center workers, and contingent workers themselves. Through collective action, we can create equitable working conditions for all writing center workers

Praxis, Volume 11, No. 01: Special Issue

Contents: From the Editors / by Sarah Orem and Jacob Pietsch -- Translating Normalcy: Tutors Navigating Spaces Between Expectations and Experiences for Non-Traditional Students / by Jennifer P. Gray -- A Hybrid Discussion of Multiliteracy and Identity Politics / by Timothy Ballingall -- Who Are "We"? Examining Identity Using the Multiple Dimensions of Identity Model / by Alanna Bitzel -- Just Writing Center Work in the Digital Age: De Factor Multiliteracy Centers in Dialogue with Questions of Social Justice / by Liliana M Naydan -- The Right Time and Proper Measure: Assessing in Writing Centers and James Kinneavy's "Kairos": A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric / by Marc Scott -- Two's Company, Three's A Conversation: A Study of Dialogue Among a Professor, A Peer-Writing Fellow, and Undergraduate Around Feedback and Writing / by Allisa-Rae Hug -- "Should I Take Notes as you Brainstorm?" Examining Consultants' In-Session Notes / by Lamiyah Bahrainwala -- Review: A Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Writing Center Tutoring / by Roger Austin -- Review: Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers / by Jeremy SmyczekUniversity Writing Cente

Praxis Vol 4, No 2: Rethinking the Writing Center

This is intended to view the Table of Contents, Columns, Focus Articles, Book Reviews, and About the Authors for Vol 14, No 2 (2017): Rethinking the Writing Center of Praxis Journals.University Writing Cente